London: Britain’s long and sometimes acrimonious divorce from the European Union ended on Thursday with an economic split that leaves the EU smaller and the UK freer but more isolated in a turbulent world.
Britain left the European blocs vast single market for people, goods and services at 11 pm London time, midnight in Brussels, completing the biggest single economic change the country has experienced since World War II. A new UK-EU trade deal will bring its own restrictions and red tape, but for British Brexit supporters, it means reclaiming national independence from the EU and its web of rules.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose support for Brexit helped push the country out of the EU, said it was ‘an amazing moment for this country’.
“We have our freedom in our hands, and it is up to us to make the most of it,” he said in a New Year’s video message.
The break comes 11 months after a political Brexit that left the two sides in the limbo of a ‘transition period’ – like a separated couple still living together, wrangling and wondering whether they can remain friends. Now the UK has finally moved out.
It was a day some had been longing for and others had been dreading since Britain voted in a 2016 referendum to leave the EU, but it turned out to be something of an anticlimax. UK lockdown measures to curb the coronavirus curtailed mass gatherings to celebrate or mourn the moment, though Parliaments huge Big Ben bell sounded 11 times on the hour as it prepared to ring in the new year at midnight.
A free trade agreement sealed on Christmas Eve after months of tense negotiations ensures that Britain and the 27-nation EU can continue to buy and sell goods without tariffs or quotas. That should help protect the USD 894 billion in annual trade between the two sides, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that rely on it.
But companies face sheaves of new costs and paperwork, including customs declarations and border checks. Traders are struggling to digest the new rules imposed by a 1,200-page trade deal that was agreed just a week before split.
The English Channel port of Dover and the Eurotunnel passenger and freight route braced for delays as the new measures were introduced, though the coronavirus pandemic and a holiday weekend meant cross-Channel traffic was light, with only a trickle of trucks arriving at French border posts in Calais as 2020 ended.
The vital supply route was snarled for days after France closed its border to UK truckers for 48 hours last week in response to a fast-spreading variant of the virus identified in England.
The British government insisted that “the border systems and infrastructure we need are in place, and we are ready for the UK’s new start”.
But freight companies were holding their breath. Youngs Transportation in the UK suspended services to the EU until 11 January ‘to let things settle’.
“We figure it gives the country a week or so to get used to all of these new systems in and out, and we can have a look and hopefully resolve any issues in advance of actually sending our trucks,” said the company’s director, Rob Hollyman.